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Continued: George Henry Evans
March 25, 1805-February 2, 1856
George Henry Evans is noted chiefly as the editor and publisher of the Working Man's Advocate, the second labor paper established in the United States. For a period in the 1830s, it was the most widely copied and quoted workingman's paper in the country. But Evans's most remarkable single achievement--one which he did not live to see realized--was the passage in 1862 of the Homestead Act, permitting free grants of public land to those who actually settled on the land. The founder, leading spirit, chief ideologue, and propagandist of the National Reform Association, he argued from a deeply held belief that a portion of land was the birthright of every man. His ideas are said to have influenced Henry George, the later social and political philosopher, and are still embedded in American thinking on land reform.
Evans was born on 25 March 1805 near Bromyard, Herefordshire, England, to George and Sarah White Evans. His father, an officer in the Napoleonic wars, was proprietor of a brick-making establishment; his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do family of veomen. A brother, Frederick Evans, born in 1808, later became the chief elder of the Shaker movement in the United States. In 1820, the father--his wife had died--left England, joining two brothers who had established themselves at Chenango Point, now Binghampton, New York. After a year there, during which the father remarried, the family moved to a farm on the Oswego turnpike near Ithaca, then a village of 800.
With a good English elementary education behind him, young George Henry, having turned sixteen, was apprenticed to A. P. Searing, a printer who published books and the weekly Ithaca Journal. Ithaca had a reputation as a center of free thought and while there. Evans probably had access to the writings of Thomas Paine, who became one of his idols. Later, he collected and printed some of Paine's miscellaneous writings and was a leading member of the Thomas Paine Society in New York. Near the end of his apprenticeship, in 1824, Evans joined another youth, L. B. Butler, in publishing the biweekly Museum and Independent Corrector, a chatty free thought paper. The paper may have lasted until 1827, when Evans left for New York to become a printer and writer for George Houston's Correspondent, also a free thought periodical. By March 1828, that paper was carrying the notice that it was printed by the "George H. Evans Printing Co." at successive addresses, including that of the Institute of Practical Education, directed by Robert Jennings.
That association led Evans to a further stage in his career. Jennings was a friend and associate of Frances Wright, a bright and beauteous Scotswoman who had a long love affair with America. By mid-1828, she had virtually abandoned one of her most quixotic and ambitious undertakings--a communal settlement at Nashoba. Tennessee, near Memphis, where she sought to have Negro slaves work out their own freedom and independence; the anticipated--but unrealized--proceeds from the farm were to go to pay their purchase price. She came to New Harmony, Indiana, a commune backed by the wealthy English industrialist Robert Owen. The community had a functioning but money-losing newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette. She and Owen's son, Robert Dale Owen, took over the editorship of the paper, ultimately renaming it the Free Enquirer. As its fame spread, due to Wright's growing notoriety as a lecturer (women simply did not give public lectures in the 1820s). She determined to move it to New York. Through Jennings, Evans became its printer, a post in which he continued (with the exception of a few issues) until the paper changed ownership in 1832.
In the Free Enquirer. Owen and Wright made favorable references to the Mechanics' Free Press, the first true labor paper in the United States, started in Philadelphia in 1828. In 1829 a labor movement, whose component groups had succeeded in reducing the workday from twelve hours or more to ten, arose in New York. One of its cardinal aims was to maintain the ten-hour day in opposition to employers who wanted to return to the earlier system. The movement's other interests included the passage of a mechanics' lien law, giving workmen legal claims to pay for work they had done under contractors, who sometimes refused such pay; an end to imprisonment for debt; abolition of the militia system, which required military service without pay under penalty of fine or jail, and which bore most harshly upon low-paid workers who could not afford to buy their way out; and improved educational opportunities for children of the poor and middle classes. The movement entered the political arena as the Working Men's party in October 1829.
While the Free Enquirer was useful in the ensuing political campaign of the new party, which entered candidates for New York City and some state political offices, another newspaper was needed. The commercial papers of the city could not be counted upon to support so "radical" a movement. Accordingly, and probably with some financial support from Owen and Wright, Evans brought out on Saturday, 23 October 1829, the first issue of the Working Man's Advocate, a five-column, four-page weekly. Its "flag" carried the note "edited by a Mechanic" (Evans). The name Working Man's Advocate, he recalled later, was adopted "on the spur of the moment," despite objections by some that it was too exclusive. The paper's goal, a prospectus said, was to prevent "any further encroachments on our equal rights," and seek "the means by which all may be placed... on an equal footing."
Evans then was twenty-four years old. On 4 November 1829 he became an American citizen. He was described as a person of "full middle size, regular features, broad forehead." He was said to be "mild and courteous in his intercourse," speaking in "a plain and clear manner," never allowing himself "to arise to a passion," and remarkable for his "great evenness of temper." These personal characteristics carried over into his columns in the Advocate. He had an intellectual seriousness which he felt was shared by his workingmen subscribers. A continuing appeal of the Advocate, certainly, was what he thought on specific issues of interest to his readers.
The workingmen's movement, after achieving a startling showing in the 1829 elections in New York City, was subject to divisive pressures. It ultimately split into three factions, the largest of which was associated with Owen and Evans; another with the Tammany Democrats; and a third with the supporters of Thomas Skidmore, a radical mechanic. To counter these pressures and prepare for the 1830 elections, the leaders in the Owen-Evans wing decided a daily newspaper was needed. A $3,000 credit was arranged through Camilla Wright, Frances's sister, and in February, the New York Daily Sentinel appeared, published by a group of six printers which ultimately included Evans. Essentially, Owen edited it, although he sought to hide this fact. Evans's primary responsibility continued to be the weekly Advocate. By June, however, the Advocate--which printed material from the Sentinel--was describing itself as the "country edition" of that paper. One student of the workingmen's movement, Helene Zahler, has identified over fifty other newspapers in the East, the South, and the Midwest which endorsed, sympathized with, and imitated the Advocate. Yet its circulation probably never passed the 2,000 mark; and in keeping with Evans's expressed philosophy that a newspaper should be a carrier of ideas and should not depend for its success (as many did) on official advertisements, it never attracted any great quantity of advertising.
In 1830 the Sentinel called for an association of editors which would work for "fairness, temperate argument and courteous language, and against party abuse, personalities, and misrepresentation of opinion." This was perhaps the first time that such an association had been suggested. A few other papers endorsed the idea, but it was not acted upon. The Sentinel passed in 1831 to the joint proprietorship of Evans and William J. Stanley, and in 1832 to Evans alone. He discontinued it in July 1833 because of "insufficient patronage."
The 1833 success of Benjamin Day--who had worked with Evans on the Sentinel and remained a friend--and his Morning Sun led Evans on 18 February 1834 to bring out his own "penny paper"--The Man. It soon attained a circulation of over 2,000 and was active in support of President Andrew Jackson's battle against the Bank of the United States. The Working Man's Advocate, which remained a weekly, drew heavily on the daily material in The Man, and, as with the Sentinel, was termed its "country" edition. The advent of James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald in 1835, however, increased the bitter competition among the penny papers, and with economic conditions weakening, Evans was forced to discontinue the daily. Later that year, he moved to Rahway, New Jersey, and published the Advocate there for several months. Already ill from overwork, he found the damp climate of Rahway unhealthy for himself and his family, and in 1836 he moved to Granville Township in Monmouth County, New Jersey, where he had purchased a forty-acre farm in 1832. Early in 1837, he suspended the Advocate and devoted himself to farming.
But in 1841, as he regained his health, he came out with a new publication, The Radical, a three-column monthly, which he printed at Granville. It was, he said, a continuation of the Working Man's Advocate, "devoted to the abolition of the land monopoly and other democratic reforms." In its sporadic numbers, he stated his own "doctrine" on the question of the public lands, which had been perturbing the U.S. Congress. He stressed that land "should not be a matter of traffic, gift or will," and that the public lands of the United States should be given free to actual settlers. In Evans's conception, settlers who received public land in the newer states would be entitled to bequeath only 160 or 320 acres to their heirs. These holdings would be absolutely inalienable, with sale or mortgage prohibited. If other holdings from public lands were sold, the price should only be for the improvements made on them. Evans never fully elaborated on this point, as he believed that the public lands were so vast that they could meet the demands of settlers for the next 200 years. In Evans's ideas were the seeds of the 1862 Homestead Act. Other reforms on the seventeen-item list included the right of all citizens to vote; election of all government officers by the people; a district system of elections; direct election of the president and vice-president by the people, throughout the nation, on the same day; direct taxation; and submission of all laws to the vote of the people.
In 1844, despite his announced distaste for city living, he returned from Granville to New York City. There, with a group of friends, he launched the National Reform Association. It agitated for freedom of the public lands; exemption of homesteads from legal seizure for debt, nonpayment of taxes, or even failure to complete the appropriate land claims; and limitations on the purchase and ownership of private lands. The proposals were presented to the political candidates of all parties. If the candidate pledged to support the principles, the National Reformers would vote for him; if there was no pledge, they would withhold their votes. Clearly, the National Reformers were an early special interest group. Two papers carried the message of the National Reformers to the public: People's Rights, a triweekly published in John Windt's shop, and the Working Man's Advocate (New Series), which Evans printed and edited. The Advocate was termed the "country edition" of People's Rights.
Although the National Reformers were few in number, between 400 and 500 by mid-1844, they were extremely vocal, holding public meetings in the city's parks and circulating petitions and "agrarian pledges." The idea that every citizen had a "right" to land was popular, even among workers who had no intention of moving West. It also provided a justification for frontiersmen who chafed at government insistence on land sales and resented the huge profits of land speculators. Ultimately, over 600 of the 2,000 newspapers in the United States were to endorse the idea of "free" homesteads. In large part, this was due to Evans's adroit propagandizing. His converts included Horace Greely, whose own New York Tribune had far more influence than Evans's low-circulation Advocate.
The land issue, however, became inseparably linked with the slavery controversy. The North and the West, to prevent the spread of slavery, wished to keep it out of the new states which were joining the Union. Low-or no-cost 160-acre homesteads, whose settlers would till their own land, were a way of assuring that slavery would not spread. So the Free Soil party--the name has a double significance, free of slavery and free land--emerged in the mid-1840s. It combined the interests of the older Liberty party, the National Reformers, the Barnburning (liberal) Democrats, and the antislavery Whigs. After Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren provided a crucial margin against Democrat Lewis Cass in the 1848 presidential election, resulting in the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, the Free Soilers were succeeded in 1854 by the new Republican party.
During this tortured period, Evans maintained a friendship and exchanged letters with-Gerrit Smith, a New York landowner and philanthropist who was active in the antislavery movement. Smith even advanced some small sums for the support of the Advocate's work. Evans consistently supported liberal causes, including the case of Governor Thomas Dorr of Rhode Island, who was arrested and imprisoned by his opposition after supporting suffrage reforms. He also took the side of the "renters" in upper New York State in the long, drawn out struggle with the landholding patroons, who sought to collect back rents on farms tilled for generations by single families. The Oregon territory, he said, might be a good place to start his "experiment" with homestead farms. In the debate over the annexation of Texas, he stressed that a condition should be that it "abolish the land monopoly to prevent white slavery, and provide for the speedy extinction of black slavery."
Still, the Advocate was not a paying proposition, and for some weeks in late 1844, in an effort to solve its financial problems, Evans merged it with the Subterranean, published by the flamboyant and irrepressible Mike Walsh, who headed a group of young Democrats known as "the Spartan Band." The arrangement ended when Walsh was jailed for libel and complained that Evans--left in charge of the printing--had censored his comments on the case.
As a part of the process of informing and educating his readers, Evans--as in his earlier papers--reprinted substantial excerpts from British working-class newspapers. In this he was relatively unique, since most American editors preferred to use the older, elite British press. The "Young England" movement, in which Benjamin Disraeli and others sought to protect both landholders and workingmen, attracted him. In 1845 he closed out the final volume of the Advocate and retitled the paper Young America as "more expressive" of the land reform movement. During that spring and summer, he took a leading role in agitation which resulted in the calling of a "National Industrial Congress" of labor and reform groups in Boston in 1846. The periodic congresses, held in various cities, have been viewed as a significant predecessor of labor unions and a continuing force for liberal principles.
Young America, meanwhile, pressed forward on the issue of free public land. In the fall of 1845 the National Reform candidates showed substantial gains in the New York elections and saw their proposal formally endorsed by Horace Greely, who, during a brief congressional term in 1848, introduced his own version of a "homestead" bill. With the Tribune and other papers taking up the free public land issue, the role of Evans and Young America began to diminish. Gaps in publication of paper began to occur, and it ceased publication in 1849. By that year, Evans evidently had retired to his New Jersey farm. His wife, Laura, who had borne him a son and two daughters, died the same year, and over her grave he put a marker with this touching inscription: "She bore, without murmuring, all the privation necessary for the cause her husband espoused, and now while we mourn the vacant chair, she sleeps calmly, with the branches above waving a requiem over her grave...."
Left with one daughter, Edwina, who was only six, and another, Frances, only eight, Evans remarried. His second wife, Mary Ann, survived until 1876. His son, George Henry, Jr., twice enlisted in New Jersey regiments during the Civil War but never attained the distinction of his father.
Evans caught a severe cold while working on his farm in January 1856 and died in his home on 2 February, just two months short of his fifty-first birthday. His passing went almost unremarked, although the New York Tribune carried a two-line notice on 9 February. On his death, Evans owed nearly $3,000, with assets valued at only $1,038. These included two printing presses, one power and one hand; two type cases; and some stereotype plates, together valued at $100. A "lot" of bound newspapers, probably his complete files of the Advocate and other papers, was valued at one dollar. All his effects were sold or dispersed. His creditors ultimately received sixty-one cents on the dollar for their claims.
In 1874 the officers of the National Reform Association--by then renamed the Land Reform Association--visited his grave in Wood Cemetery in Keansburg. They discussed the possibility of erecting a monumental bust to him in Prospect Park or Central Park in New York City. Other plans were to celebrate his birthday every year and to republish some of his writings. All of these plans came to nothing.
In 1984 a Keansburg Eagle Scout, Trevor Kirkpatrick, dug Evans's tombstone out from a mound of detritus in the abandoned and vandalized cemetery. The inscription, placed there by his widow, reads: "G. H. E. The Radical. The great object of his life was to secure homes for all by abolishing the traffic in land and limiting the individual possession of it. As editor of The Man, The Radical, The People's Rights, and Young America, he triumphantly vindicated the right of every human being to a share of the soil, as essential to the welfare and permanence of the Republic."
George Henry Evans remains a significant figure in American journalism and American political development. His newspapers provide major touchstones for an understanding of the Jacksonian era, when the "new nation" came to fruition. Certainly he spurred the development of a powerful labor press. Without him, the Homestead Act might never have been passed, and he had a decided role in the movement toward the formation of the Republican party. The loss of his personal papers has deterred any detailed study of his political thinking, which was derived from his idols Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and John Locke. His role as a political activist and propagandist is worthy of close examination, as are his links with the British reform movement and his unrecognized work in printing American editions of liberal books and tracts.
He was, too, a new kind of editor-publisher, a transitional figure between the hack political printer-editors of the early Federal period and the personal-independent editors who emerged with the spread of the popular press. Devoted to ideas and causes and consecrated to the promotion of the common welfare, he was, with the possible exceptions of William Leggett and Horace Greely, the most progressive journalistic influence of his era.
About this Essay: James Stanford Bradshaw, Central Michigan University
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 43: American Newspaper Journalists, 1690-1872. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Perry J. Ashley, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1985. pp. 184-188.
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Naturalized 4 Nov 1829
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The next ten years were spent in America in such intimate relations with my brother G. H. Evans, that some reference to him is indispensable. He was two years older than myself, and had received a scholastic education; so that, in literary knowledge, we were the two extremes of learning and ignorance. But we were brothers in a higher meaning of the term. We were Radicals in civil government, and in religion, being Materialists. He is now deceased; but he made his mark upon the page of history, which has recorded the current of thought as it flowed down from the founders of the American government to the election of Grant as President of these United Reconstructing States, upon principles more nearly realizing the abstract truisms affirmed in the Declaration of Independence than were even before advanced.
George started the land-reform movement in this country, on the basis of the principle laid down by Jefferson, that "the land belongs to man in usufruct only." And that idea was, doubtless, entertained by all the signers of the Declaration of Independence. George was contemporary with Horace Greeley in his younger days; and, at the time of starting the "New York Tribune," they were fast friends.
Another important point of agreement between the founders of the government and G. H. E. was, that they were all, so far as I know (excepting Thomas Carroll of Carrollton, who was a Catholic), infidels to the existing so-called [page 418] Christianity of the world. Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Franklin, and Washington (who has been somewhat white-washed by the sectarian priesthood) were Materialists, Deists, Unitarians, &c. These made provision that no priest of any denomination should hold any office under this government.
This school of mind had progressed up to the Community theories of Fourier and Owen, and the attempts to realize them in various places in Europe and America were most rife about the year 1830.
The right to be and the right to land, each included the other; we held that they were identical; and hence we waged a fierce and relentless war against all forms of property accumulation that owed their origin to land monopoly, speculation, or usury.
While still an apprentice at Ithaca, G. H. E. published "The Man." Afterwards I combined my means with his, and we published, successively, "The Workingman's Advocate," "The Daily Sentinel," and, finally, "Young America," besides a great variety of other publications, including "The Bible of Reason," &c., &c.; none of which, in a pecuniary point of view, was successful; for G. H. E. was a poor financier, and we had a tremendous current to stem. But that these publications had a controlling influence upon the American press, may be inferred from the very frequent quotations in other papers from the editorials of "Young America," and also from the fact that six hundred papers indorsed the following measures, which were printed at the head of "Young America":--
"First, The right of man to the soil: 'Vote yourself a farm.' "Second. Down with monopolies, especially the United States Bank. "Third. Freedom of the public lands. "Fourth. Homesteads made inalienable. "Fifth. Abolition of all laws for the collection of debts. "Sixth. A general bankrupt law. "Seventh. A lien of the laborer upon his own work for his wages. "Eighth. Abolition of imprisonment for debt. "Ninth. Equal rights for women with men in all respects. "Tenth. Abolition of chattel slavery and of wages slavery. "Eleventh. Land limitation to one hundred and sixty acres, --no person, after the passage of the law, to become possessed of more than that amount of land. But, when a land monopolist died, his heirs were to take each his legal number of acres, and be compelled to sell the overplus, using the proceeds as the pleased.
"Twelfth. Mails, in the United States, to run on the Sabbath." These and similar views and principles we held and propagated to the very best of our ability; for our whole hearts and souls were in them.
This Spartan band was few in number; but there were deep thinkers among them; and all were earnest, practical workers in behalf of the down-trodden masses of humanity. It was war between abstract right and conventional rights. We held the Constitution to be only a compromise between the first principles of the American government, as they were set forth in the Declaration of Independence, drawn up by Jefferson, and the then existing vested rights of property-holders and conservatives of all sorts, secular and religious; and we contended that the mutual, well-understood intention and design of the founders of the government was, that, as soon as was possible, the Constitution should be amended, so as to conform more and more to the ideal pattern set forth in the declaration of rights inherent in humanity, it being a question only as to how long an acknowledge wrong should be permitted!
Our little party gradually and steadily increased, and acquired the title of "The Locofoco Party" in the following manner: On the evening of the 29th of October, 1835, a great meeting was to be held in Tammany Hall, by the Democratic party (which was then and there split into two, and in which [page 419] the Radical Land Reformers triumphed, taking with them a large portion of the party. The conservative leaders came up the back stairs into the hall, and secured the fore part of the meeting, and elected a chairman and committee. But these were finally entirely outvoted by the thousands of workingmen who crowded into and filled the hall, ejecting Isaac L. Varian, whom the monopolists had installed, and putting in Joel Curtis as chairman. Then the conservatives retired in disgust down the back stairs as they came in, and revengefully turned off the gas, leaving the densely packed hall in total darkness. The cry was raised, "Let there be light," and "there was light"; for locofoco matches were ignited all over the room, and applied to candles, when a fine illumination ensured, creating great enthusiasm, which finally, resulted in the election of Andrew Jackson and B. M. Johnson as President and Vice-President of the United States. For it was soon found that the Locofoco party held the balance of power; and they offered their entire vote to whichever of the parties would put at the head of their great party papers the twelve measure above enumerated, and the offer was accepted by the Democratic party.
Thus, during the last thirty-eight years, have been accomplished the following among our progressive purposes, viz.:--
Second. The United States Bank over-thrown. Third. Freedom of public lands to actual settlers secured. Fourth. Homestead laws in nearly all of the States. Sixth. General bankrupt laws passed by the United States. Seventh. Lien of laborers upon work to a great extent secured. Eighth. Abolition of imprisonment for debt, in most of the United States. Tenth. Abolition of chattel slavery in the United States entire. Ninth. Equal rights for women is next in order. Autobiography of a Shaker by Frederick W. Evans from The Atlantic Monthly
Volume 23, Issue 138, Atlantic Monthly, Boston, April 1869
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